Page 1 of The Layover

1

Carly

A lot of people thought my life was glamorous—jetting around the world all the time. Different country every month. Different rooms. Different scenery. Different guy’s bed… With no partner or kids for me to answer to, and an empty apartment in between trips.

Anyone who thought that was right—I loved my life.

It was why I was sitting in the airport at eight-thirty on Monday morning, listening to the bedlam while I scanned the headlines on my phone.

Most of the people waiting with me were doing the same, except for the two men sitting a few rows away.

My gaze drifted to them every few seconds, not because they were sharing a phone and speaking Italian to the person on the other end of the line, but because they were h-a-w-t, and that spelled hello, sexy baby.

Baby because they were probably a decade younger than me, and it was easier to think of them as being barely adults than remember I was turning forty-one in just a few weeks.

They both had dark, almost black hair, and eyes in a similar color. The kind of gazes that were probably deceptive reflecting pools up close. And they both wore simple platinum bands on their left ring fingers.

One was dressed like he was straight out of a fashion shoot—burgundy button-down shirt, dark trousers, and a suede vest, buttoned and showing off a trim and slender figure.

The other wore jeans. His button-down was a similar color beige to the walls, but the sleeves were rolled up halfway to the elbow, leaving his thick forearms and large, rough hands on display, and highlighting the bulge of his biceps.

I bet they were pretty when they fucked.

I knew just enough Italian to pick out a handful of words. Combined with the snippets I heard coming from the phone they shared, it sounded like they were talking to a young girl. There was a lot of laughing and cooing and praise.

The entire exchange made me smile, and not just because the men were easy to look at. I may be childless by choice, but I loved seeing happy, loving families. The world needed more of those.

I turned my attention back to my own phone, and the news. Specifically, finance and industry. It could be some dry as toast shit, but I worked for an angel investor firm and had regular dealings with clients, so it helped to speak their language and have an idea of what was looming on the horizon for me.

One of the big companies was up, one was down, one had pissed off a subset of their users, another had a data breach.

I filed away the stories that would be global news when I reached my destination in Milan, and moved on. What books were new and hot this week? That was my kind of news. Especially those books that most people would turn their noses up at as being smutty or fantasy fulfillment for women. Like either of those were a bad thing?

Wait, what was that?

I flipped back to the screen I’d just left and scanned the page, looking for what had caught my eye. No. Fucker. I wanted to shout it out loud, but I settled for screaming in my head.

Renowned Architect Curtis Webb to Make the Old New Again

The article went on to describe how the creative and talented Dr. Webb was breathing new life into a structure in Milan, and turning it into a modern-day eatery.

Dr. Webb only had his PhD because I’d written the bulk of his dissertation. That was young and stupid me—in my late twenties, convinced that I was unlovable because I wasn’t married yet, and happy to give my affections to any man who smiled at me and made sure I had an orgasm the first time we had sex.

Fuck, Curtis had been an incredible lay in the early days. But a whirlwind romance, a Vegas wedding, and about six months of marriage had turned him into a basement dwelling troll who kept me around to do his laundry and his schoolwork.

I stuck it out longer than I should’ve, thinking that I must be the problem, and when I finally sucked it up and left him, he drove that point home.

Since then I’d learned that book boyfriends were the only good boyfriends.

It sucked that our paths occasionally ran near each other. I was an appraiser and property evaluator, so running into renowned architects came with the territory. But for the most part, I didn’t have to talk to him, see him, or even think about Dr. Curtis Webb.

Looked like I couldn’t avoid that this time. The property he was working on in Milan was within a few blocks of the one I was on my way to spend several weeks with. One of our newest investment clients was restoring a church right down the street from Curtis’s project, and I was heading there to be on site while things kicked off.

It wasn’t just the vicinity of his project to mine that rubbed me wrong, it was the language in the article. Because our clients were doing something with an almost identical marketing campaign behind it—preserving the old while blending it with the new.

My phone buzzed with a new text message.

You reading the news? It was from my best friend and work partner in crime, Daria.

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